Local politics in the San Gabriel Valley

Main menu

Post navigation

Taco trucks still here, for now

The Los Angeles Times reports that taco trucks are still here, for now. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, however, will be appealing a decision by a LA County Superior Court Judge on Wednesday.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge Wednesday overturned a controversial ordinance passed in April by county supervisors that made it a misdemeanor in unincorporated parts of the county to park a taco truck in one spot for more than an hour.

The language of the ordinance, Judge Dennis A. Aichroth said, was “vague” and therefore “unconstitutional” in its description of how quickly a vendor could return to an area where the truck was previously parked. Aichroth said it also violated the vehicle code because county supervisors had not properly established that it was written in the interest of public safety.

The attorney who won the case on behalf of Margarita Garcia, a ticketed taco vendor whose violation was dismissed by Aichroth, said he expected that the county would try to rewrite the law. “It’ll probably be just as miserable as the one they just wrote,” said Philip C. Greenwald, who represents a newly formed association of catering truck operators. “They won’t win.”

The deputy district attorney who tried the case against Garcia was unavailable for comment, but a spokeswoman for Supervisor Gloria Molina, the ordinance’s author, said the fight was not over.

“We knew from the start,” spokeswoman Roxanne Marquez said, “that this case would go to court. We will appeal and we expect to win.”